Let me start by saying this: I’ve never met Jed Latkin, but after watching Fantasyland, I feel pretty safe in saying I would not enjoy playing in a fantasy league with him.

Latkin is the central character in the feature-length documentary released Friday via Snagfilms.com and Hulu. The movie — inspired by Sam Walker’s 2007 book of the same name — finds Latkin selected from a group of applicants to fill one of 12 slots in the 2008 AL-only Tout Wars league.

He doesn’t come across as a bad guy in general, but Latkin does strike me as potentially one of the worst possible leaguemates — more annoying than the guy who goes dark after the draft and winds up with two disabled-list players sitting in his starting lineup by June.

Latkin epitomizes the obsessed fantasy player. He estimates that he averages 2-3 hours of sleep a night during baseball season. He stares intently at the computer as his wife is talking to him about getting everything together for their trip to the hospital to have twins. He sits in the living room of his in-laws and talks about how he could manage other teams in the league better than the owners currently doing so.

The really annoying part, though, is the trading. I love hitting the trade desk as much as most folks, but Latkin started making offers before people had left the draft site. He hounds leaguemates on the phone like a used-car salesman (which he’s compared to in the movie) about to lose his job. In the most extreme example, he shows up unannounced at the doorstep of Ron Shandler’s house — a mere 7-hour, 40-minute drive from his place in New York.

“That was the most freakin’ bizarre thing I’ve ever seen,” Shandler says after this Tout rookie spends probably a couple of hours trying to talk him into a trade for B.J. Ryan. Yeah, Latkin made a 15-hour round trip just because he wasn’t satisfied with Shandler’s e-mail answers to trade offers.

All that said, it’s not hard to see why the Fantasyland folks chose Latkin for the spot.

He’s a compelling character, somewhat in the vein of the famous Howard Stern trends we’re all familiar with. (You know: The average Stern fan listens for an hour and 20 minutes; average Stern hater listens for 2.5 hours — both because they want to hear what he’ll say next.)

It’s like that with Latkin. Some obsessive fantasy fans (at least those who can click away from FanGraphs long enough to watch) might be able to relate. The rest of us will probably have trouble believing the extent of his madness.

Fantasyland is well constructed and does a very nice job of playing up and playing off his fantasy eccentricities. My favorite segment cut back and forth between Latkin at a Tigers game and Sam Walker with his family at a park.

While Latkin has left his wife behind in New York with twin infants to go chat up some of his players at Comerica Park, Walker strolls from his place to a playground with wife and two kids. As Latkin slips deeper into depression with each fantasy failure for his team, Walker gives us lines like, “The nice thing about Jed … I feel a little bit more normal.”

This all becomes even more amusing when Walker finishes the season with the highest score ever recorded in an AL-only Tout league, while Latkin finishes somewhere toward the league’s middle.

I won’t give away any more details on the league standings, so as not to ruin the movie’s central plotline, though I will say that Latkin at least accomplished his stated pre-draft goal.

The key thing to take away from this documentary — especially if you’re not overly familiar with fantasy players — is that Latkin does not represent anywhere near the norm. There are certainly other players like him, but the large majority of us are relatively normal folks who just enjoy building teams and trying to beat our peers. Just look at the way this league of fantasy professionals reacts to the new guy.

And you should take something away from this movie, because it’s worth watching for anyone who’s into fantasy. Aside from the entertaining storyline at the center, the film is well packaged, with sidebars playing up aspects from the book (”Stories from Fantasyland“) and fun little quips such as the “fake but potentially true stats.”

When I first heard that a Fantasyland movie was on the way, I expected some sort of adaptation with an actor playing the part of Sam Walker. The documentary, however, proves that even when it comes to fantasy, reality can give us characters too strange to have been made up.

“I was a schmuck for not making any money on this thing,” Daniel Okrent says early in a Forbes.com story posted Wednesday.

Although Okrent is universally attributed with creating what we know most commonly as fantasy baseball, he and his fellow originators failed to capitalize on their copyrighted Rotisserie Baseball.

But while the Forbes report leads with that unfortunate tale, the crux of the item is really the advice sought from Okrent and several of his leaguemates — as well as select other experts from the fantasy industry.

Forbes went to the eight gentlemen listed below in search of some player recommendations and a bit of sage advice. You’ll have to click on the links for the players. For the words of wisdom on the other hand, look no further than …

Daniel Okrent, creator of Rotisserie Baseball: Pay attention to your wife.

Ron Shandler, Baseball HQ: Decide whether you are in this to have fun or to win. In many cases, those two goals are mutually exclusive.

Harry Stein, original member of Okrent’s league: Bid up superstars (in auction drafts), but make sure someone else gets them. The successful rotisserie player does not get wedded to the idea of landing a particular player. And avoid one-dimensional players.

Scott Swanay, FantasyBaseballSherpa.com: Use a set of player rankings that quantifies position scarcity. If time permits, compare your player rankings to Average Draft Position (ADP) data from a credible source (such as Mock Draft Central) to avoid picking your targeted players too soon.

Sam Walker, Fantasyland: Read psychology books. The way to win is to understand the people in your league and to know what they do before they do it. Try to get inside peoples’ heads.

Bobby Jurney, 2008 winner of NBC Sports’ National Fantasy Baseball Championship: Know the players. It is easy to draft the big names, but nine times out of 10, that is not going to win you anything. It is the people who do the research and know all of the players, big and small, that are going to be successful.

Cary Schneider, original member of Okrent’s league: Find someone younger than you to give you information. If you’re over 30 you won’t know who any of these players are.

Nando Di Fino, The Wall Street Journal: Don’t follow the experts blindly. And read Rotoworld or Rotowire every day. (Di Fino forgot to add: “… and FSB.com.”)

What do you do when baseball season is just about to end and you’re on the verge of winning your second AL-only fantasy title in the most country’s most prominent league?

You host a party where you can invite your leaguemates and friends for drinks and bowing.

“Fantasyland” author Sam Walker and Wall Street Journal fantasy columnist Nando Di Fino are about to finalize their team’s second championship in the past four years in the Tout Wars AL-only league. In light of that, Walker sent out an invitation Friday for friends and foes to join the winning co-owners in New York City for drinks and bows.

As of Friday night, the team of Walker and Di Fino sat 23 rotisserie points ahead of the second-place squad. By comparison, seven other teams were within that range behind second place, which was occupied by Baseball Info Solutions.

Meanwhile, Wise Guy Baseball’s Mike Lombardo is similarly running away with the Tout Wars AL-only title. Three teams — run by CBS Sports’ Dave Gonos, MLB.com’s Alex Cushing and Pro Trade’s Jeff Ma — are battling it out for the mixed-league crown. They sat within three points of each other on Friday night.

Although the winner in each group will get the satisfaction of beating some of the industry’s top fantasy minds, only Walker and Di Fino can say they’ve been featured on a tasteful, elegant celebratory poster.

Who: Nando Di Fino
What: Fantasy writer for The Wall Street Journal

“I kind of just fell backwards into all the fantasy stuff and decided to roll with it.”

That’s how Nando Di Fino describes how he got to be the first writer to cover fantasy sports for The Wall Street Journal. OK, well, maybe that’s oversimplifying just a little bit.

Once upon a time, Di Fino only casually participated in fantasy leagues.

“Like really casually,” he says. “I remember Sandbox once disbanded my team when I went to Italy for a couple months because I didn’t make lineup changes for three weeks.”

Things changed, though, when Di Fino was working on his master’s degree in history at Fordham University and he took a job with SportsTicker, scoring a couple of baseball games a day. Along with paying him a little money, the gig provided him with experience in research and writing, as well as “an insane amount of worthless baseball knowledge.” (That must go beyond the amount built into the average American male’s DNA.) It also got him onboard with Wall Street Journal reporter Sam Walker for his book “Fantasyland.”

The exposure from the book led to Matthew Berry inviting Di Fino onto the team at Talented Mr. Roto, which led to him joining ESPN’s fantasy department when the company bought TMR. How he went from there to The Wall Street Journal, even Di Fino can’t pinpoint.

“I’m not 100% sure, but they had mentioned that they were going to start addressing [fantasy], and I had a burger and beer with the editor of the page, and I think we hit it off,” Di Fino says. “We kicked around some story ideas, he read some of my stuff on the now-defunct ‘Nandovia’ page that Sam forced me to write for the book, and that was that.”

His initial offering for the Journal profiled the industry’s three top injury analysts - Stephania Bell, Will Carroll and Rick Wilton - and he has added an article a week since. Subject matter has comprised such topics as the potential impact of fantasy on professional beach volleyball, the value of playing fantasy sports with your children and the evolution of fantasy baseball statistics. More than a mere fantasy-advice column, it’s a spot that calls attention to various areas of the industry, giving mainstream treatment to a rapidly growing market that was once relegated to the fringes.

Aside from getting used to addressing his subjects formally as “Mr.” and “Ms.” upon second reference, Di Fino says he hasn’t been given too many restrictions by his editors.

“The parameters were pretty vague,” he says. “Obviously the Journal has really high standards, and not from necessarily a haughty, business-like point of view, but from the quality that they expect from the writers. This isn’t something I can sit down and write two nights before.

“I basically look at it like this: I send it to my brother Joe when I’m done, and if he says it’s not funny, or it’s boring, or if he’s even the tiniest bit unenthusiastic about it, I tear it to shreds and rewrite it. The last thing I want is for this column to be stale or boring.”

Career development stuff aside, though, the important thing is that his fantasy play has taken off since its early days. He limits himself to three football leagues, including one with buddies from back home that has been going on for about 15 years.

Baseball, though, the sport that launched him as a fantasy writer, remains king.

“Nothing beats rotisserie baseball for me,” Di Fino says. “Football is fun, but there’s so much luck and racing to the waiver wire involved.”

He’d better like it, as Di Fino says he balances 14 fantasy baseball teams. He’s quick to point out, though, that many are shared with Walker, lest someone mistake him for a fantasy geek.